Construction of chimaeric DNA molecules in vitro relies traditionally on two enzymatic steps catalyzed by separate protein components. Site-specific restriction endonucleases are used to generate linear DNAs with defined termini that can then be joined covalently at their ends via the action of DNA ligase.
Vaccinia DNA topoisomerase, a 314-aa virus-encoded eukaryotic type I topoisomerase [11], binds to duplex DNA and cleaves the phosphodiester backbone of one strand. The enzyme exhibits a high level of sequence specificity, akin to that of a restriction endonuclease. Cleavage occurs at a consensus pentapyrimidine element 5′-(C/T)CCTTø in the scissile strand [12, 5, 6]. In the cleavage reaction, bond energy is conserved via the formation of a covalent adduct between the 3′ phosphate of the incised strand and a tyrosyl residue (Tyr-274) of the protein [10]. Vaccinia topoisomerase can religate the covalently held strand across the same bond originally cleaved (as occurs during DNA relaxation) or it can religate to a heterologous acceptor DNA and thereby create a recombinant molecule [7, 8].
The repertoire of DNA joining reactions catalyzed by vaccinia topoisomerase has been studied using synthetic duplex DNA substrates containing a single CCCTT cleavage site. When the substrate is configured such that the scissile bond is situated near (within 10 bp of) the 3′ end of a DNA duplex, cleavage is accompanied by spontaneous dissociation of the downstream portion of the cleaved strand [4]. The resulting topoisomerase-DNA complex, containing a 5′ single-stranded tail, can religate to an acceptor DNA if the acceptor molecule has a 5′ OH tail complementary to that of the activated donor complex. Sticky-end ligation by vaccinia topoisomerase has been demonstrated using plasmid DNA acceptors with four base overhangs created by restriction endonuclease digestion [8].